H4 In Dutch Water Meadows. 



and combinations of its zebra stripes of black and 

 white. 



For half a moment, as it settles, the bird is still, 

 and you see two distinct horseshoes of jet on a snow- 

 ball. Before the roughest sketch is possible the 

 position of the restless wings shifts and the horse- 

 shoes meet and open into a double heart, one inside 

 the other. It rises, breast towards you, and you see 

 a bird, pure white excepting at the wing-tips, which 

 look as if dipped in ink. It turns sharply off, with 

 the everlasting " Kiew ! kiew ! " and you seem to be 

 looking not at a bird, but an overgrown " Bath-white " 

 Butterfly. 



At last you have had one quiet before you long 

 enough to be satisfied at least that the tail is black, 

 and are hurriedly scratching a sketch accordingly, 

 when the black flies up on the tips of the wing and 

 the bird is off, turning towards you a tail of the purest 

 white. 



They were very plentiful, and wonderfully tame. 

 We must have seen something like fifty on the one 

 corner of the polder, to which they seemed mainly to 

 confine themselves, and where we found both eggs 

 and young birds. 



As we lay for luncheon on our macintoshes spread 

 on a patch of thrift, not far from the water's edge, 

 the old birds played and fed close by us, swinging 

 sideways, their slender turned-up beaks like strips 

 of bent whalebone splashing visibly at times with 

 the strokes, and ran bent forward through the water, 

 sometimes breast-high, with a quick, jerky, and rather 

 laboured step, the position of the body and action 

 suggestive of a long-legged, paddling child in a great 

 hurry to get a shrimping-net on shore. 



The neck, as the bird ran or fed, was commonly 



